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ADDRESS 



OF THE 



PRESIDENT OF THE 
UNITED STATES 



AT 

THE COLLEGE OF 
WILLIAM AND MARY 
WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA 
OCTOBER 19, 1921 




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WASHINGTON 
1921 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS \ 

y RECEIVED 

OCTJStMl 






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AT THE COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY, OCTO- 
BER 19, 1921. 

Members of the faculty, friends of William and Mary Col- 
lege, MY COUNTRYMEN ALL : It is good to staiid at this educational 
shrine, in the atmosphere of the Old Dominion, catching the spirit 
of early America, and sensing the early purpose to give the educa- 
tional impulse to American accomplishment. Perhaps I feel the 
partiality of an Ohioan for the mother colony, since we do not forget 
that Ohio and the sisterhood of States wrought out of the Northwest 
territory were Virginia's magnificent gift to the Union. It was our 
fortune in Ohio, more than a century ago, to erect a State through 
the blend of New Englanders, Pennsylvanians, and Virginians, and 
the succeeding generations hav« watched the westward march of the 
Star of Empire until we join to-day in the glories and achievements 
of the great Eepublic — our common country. 

I like to speak of it now, because I know the very soul of our com- 
mon pride in America. We grew sectional once, but we of North 
and South alike made such a sacrificial offering of good American 
blood on the soil of Virginia that concord sprang up from the seeds- 
planted a century and a half ago, and the bloom is that of a grate- 
fully united Eepublic, with one purpose, one pride, one confidence, 
one constitution, one people, and one flag. 

Men speak of North and South and East and West. Geograph- 
ically they are correct. Customs are ofttimes varied, conditions are 
many times different, occupations are influenced by locality, but the 
interests and aspirations are common, devotion to country is every- 
where the same, and the spirit of America^ reawakened and re- 
dedicated, illumines the onward way for air alike. 

On occasions such as bring us here to-day, it has been well- 
nigh an immemorial practice to speak of the importance and value 
of education, and to urge upon the young that by properly equipping 
themselves in the realm of scholarship, they will become the in- 
heritors of both the culture of the past and the chief responsibilities 
of present and future. It has seemed to me that, in view of condi- 
tions which surround education in our country to-day, we might 
vary that custom, and consider the responsibility of the community 
at large toward its scholars and scholarship. • 

Time was, and not so long ago, when a college education was: 
looked upon as the privilege of him who should be so fortunate as to 

71821—21 (3) 



attain it; when it represented the assurance of place among the in- 
tellectual aristocracy, the satisfactions of culture, the gratification 
of refined tastes, and, presumably, a somewhat easier mode of life 
than might be expected by the less fortunate person who had failed 
to attain it. 

How greatly our attitude has changed, how different has become 
the status of him who has enjoyed the wider educational advantages, 
is suggested by the most casual consideration of the present position 
of education as a profession, and of the educated man in the com- 
munity. A generation of intensified materialism has brought a 
change that is no less than startling. I was reminded of it recently 
in reading an address of the late Senator George F. Hoar on an occa- 
sion not unlike this which brings us here. To the commencement 
assemblage of one of the older colleges he spoke of the long-main- 
tained domination of England by the aristocratic " county families." 
He pointed out that for centuries, generation after generation, their 
peculiar position had made them the leading influence in the English 
community, because they constituted its aristocracy of wealth, cul- 
ture, education and character. 

Then, glimpsing the contrast between American and English life, 
he pointed out to the college men before him that to them was re- 
served a closely corresponding position in the American community. 
No aristocracy of inherited wealth, position, title, distinction existed 
here ; the real aristocracy was that of intellect, of the university and 
college men, who he said occupied here the place corresponding to 
that of the old county aristocracy in England. 

It is hardly a rounded generation since that analysis was presented 
by the great New England Senator; yet I suspect that if he were 
speaking in my place to-day he would make a very different address 
than he made three decades ago at Amherst. He would note that on 
the one side we have come to esteem education, not as the privilege 
of the fortunate few but rather as the obligation and the due of so- 
ciety to the very largest possible number of its members. He would 
descry that private philanthropy and public policy have united in 
pouring out wealth in this cause with a lavishness that even in his 
day would have seemed fabulous. And yet, on the other side, he 
would see that, despite all this generosity, the educational facilities 
of the country have utterly failed to keep pace with the demands of 
a people, hungering and thirsting for knowledge, culture, vision. 
He would find that his aristocracy of intellect was being trained in 
institutions still inadequately endowed, under college faculties and 
public-school teachers whose limited incomes compelled them to envy 
the affluence of the trained artisan. He would learn that in the mad 
pursuit of money, materialism, and the indulgences which go with 
them, we have tended ofttimes to make scholarship and culture sub- 



ordinate to these. Our generation has bowed at the altar of mecha- 
nism and industrial organization, and in its devotions has too far 
forgotten that, after all, the enduring things are of a higher and very 
different sort. And I think he would warn us that we have come 
on the time when we must make these splendid material achievements, 
needful and gratefully possessed, the bases and buttresses for an 
advancing conception of eternal verities which are not of stone or 
steel, but yet a thousand times more lasting. 

Perhaps there is no more fitting place than this to present a few 
fragmentary and quite casual impressions about the place and needs 
of education in our American society. The College of William and 
Mary was founded under the first royal charter to an American 
college. Its traditions are those of all America, and of all Ameri- 
can history. But they are more than that. They are also the tra- 
ditions of resumed progress by the English-speaking people toward 
popular rule, following the revolutions that ended Stuart rule. It 
dates back to the old days when mariners were yet seeking the 
" northwest passage " to the Indies, undreaming that the barrier which 
fretted them in their quest was in the broadest truth a new world. 
Its story comprehends the eras of discovery, of colonization, of revo- 
lution, and independence ; after that, the marvels of national growth 
and development ; the tragedy of fratricidal war, in which, typifying 
our country and institutions, it escaped destruction only at the price 
of a baptism in fire. 

But its genius for drawing close to the spirit of the times, for al- 
ways contributing greatly to the leadership of great affairs, has been 
the abiding glory of William and Mary. The spirit of human lib- 
erty — of that liberty that dares to build, to experiment, to found 
new institutes of association and conduct— has always thrived here. 
Here, I think we may safely infer, where the campus was the com- 
mon ground between the old State House and the college structures, 
is to be found the oldest inspiration of the State university system 
which has done so much for liberal and truly democratic education. 
Here came Jefferson, author of the immortal Declaration, to expand 
a medieval college into a modern university on lines as broad as his 
own concept of human rights ; here he found an atmosphere in which 
to develop) those noble sentiments of mankind's fraternity which en- 
abled him, years after writing our own Dieclaration of Independence, 
to become one of the moral inspirations and intellectual counsellors 
of the French Revolution. Here Washington was granted a degree, 
and here he served as chancellor. From this institution were grad- 
uated three Presidents— Jefferson, Monroe, and Tyler. The great 
lawgiver of the young Eepublic, John Marshall, was another alum- 
nus; and so was George Wythe, signer of the Declaration and pre- 
ceptor to Marshall and Jefferson. 



But it would be impossible to attempt a catalogue of the great 
Americans who have received education and inspiration here. That 
is. already yours, and a cherished possession. Their list would in- 
clude, liter ally a host of the most eminent names from the beginnings 
of this continent. From the earliest wars of the colonists with the 
Indians, down through all the struggles for making and establishing 
our country, the sons of William and Mary have played great parts. 
They have filled our halls of legislation, have been builders pf new 
States, have adorned the bench, and honored the bar. Always they 
have been moved by the high ambitions of unstinted, unselfish service. 

The very name of the university suggests devotion to liberty and 
liberty's institutions. Occupying historic ground in the midst of the 
peninsula on which were made the first plantings of Anglo-Saxon 
institutions in this continent, it has been at the center of great events 
from its beginnings. In the college buildings were quartered French 
troops after the surrender at Yorktown ; and in the peninsular cam- 
paign of the Civil War the college buildings were burned and the 
institution well-nigh irreparably crippled. , Only the devotion of offi- 
cers and alumni made its resuscitation, years afterward, possible. 
But it was accomplished ; and to-day William and Mary, firmly es- 
tablished, proud of its historic past, confident of its future, assured 
of its place in the affections of Virginia, the South, and the Nation, 
looks out on a prospect of yet more glorious achievement. For every 
reason of both sentiment and utility I give you my heartfelt wish 
that the effort to endow, to insure, to establish and expand this pio- 
neer among American universities, may succeed even beyond your 
fondest hopes. 

In dealing with the difficulties of our problem of popular educa- 
tion in this country, I am convinced that we will find it exceedingly 
worth while to conserve-'the traditions and ideals of such institutions 
as this. It is no exaggeration to say that the Nation confronts an 
educational crisis. From every corner of the land, from country, 
town, and city, comes the same report that the housing capacity for 
our public schools is inadequate; that tens of thousands of pupils 
have no place for their studies ; that teachers can not be listed in suf- 
ficient numbers, and that school revenues are insufficient. 

From the colleges and universities goes up the same cry. From the 
primary to the post-graduate school there is demand for facilities 
far beyond present provision. The war caused the withdrawal of an 
army of school and college teachers from their profession. The in- 
creasing specialization of business and industry has created astonish- 
ing demand for men and women of both liberal and specialized 
education. 

There never was a time when the community was ready to absorb 
into its activities so great a proportion of people highly trained 



and intellectually disciplined. It may be said that, in this realm 
of education, we have been drawing on our capital, instead of 
spending the annual increment only ; we have been taking the teach- 
ers away from the schools, and leaving a constantly increasing 
deficit in our capacity to turn out that product of disciplined minds 
which only can be insured through everexpanding facilities. If 
I may employ a homely analogy, which I trust will not be mis- 
understood, we have a vastly increased supply of basic material to 
be put through our educational mechanism; we have correspond- 
ingly increased the market for the finished product, but we are not 
maintaining the refining processes on a sufficiently large scale. And 
it happens that this particular refined product is absolutely neces- 
sary to the continuance of our institutions and our civilization. 

Let me hasten to add that this is not a condition which leads us 
to pessimism or misgivings. I would not wish it to be otherwise. 
If ever we " catch up " in provision of educational facilities, it will 
inean to me, not that our problem is solved, but that we have our 
first occasion of real concern. For no people ever approached the 
lavishness with which, from public revenue and private purse, Ameri- 
cans have given to support education; nowhere has it been so easy 
for the poor man or woman to gain its richest privilege. Yet, the 
more generously we provide to-day, the greater is the deficiency to- 
morrow; and I am glad it is thus. So long as the eagerness for 
education outruns our most generous provision of facilities, there 
will be assurance that we are going ahead, not backward. I am 
glad that, though we have billions of investment in our educational 
plant, there are yet more people seeking education, more demands 
for educated people than can be cared for. 

So long as I find that the proportion of public revenue properly 
devoted to education is increasing, I desire to be counted among those 
in public life ready and anxious to struggle with the problem of rais- 
ing the necessary revenues. But in that struggle, public officials re- 
quire the help and counsel of every citizen who visions the vital na- 
ture of this problem. Only by such united effort can we hope to meet 
this, or indeed any of the urgent demands which these anxious times 
are pressing upon us. 

I wish it were possible for us to drive home to the whole American 
people the conviction of needed concern for our educational necessi- 
ties. We must have more and better teachers, and to get them the 
profession must be compensated as it deserves. Out of some experi- 
ence in both, I feel qualified to assure you that there are two depart- 
ments, at least, of human activity, which will never strongly attract 
those who seek the merely substantial rewards. Those two are teach- 
ing and the public service. There are rewards, real and highly grati- 
fying, for those who engage in them, but they are not found in ac- 



cumulations, wealth, and tlie indulgences which wealth makes pos- 
sible. They are in the consciousness of service rendered. 

I would not attempt to attract men or women to these vocations 
through promises of merely substantial advantages, but I would 
lift up a Macedonian call, in behalf of our schools and colleges, to 
men and women who feel the urge to public usefulness. More even 
than money and endowments, our educational establishment needs 
the devout, unselfish sustaining support of people moved by in- 
stincts of patriotism and service. These, thus inspired, may be sure 
that the American public will recompense them, in such a service 
as this, to the best of its ability; and my plea to-day is for that 
largest possible liberality. 

There is another side, equally worthy of suggestion here. The 
ambition for education and its opportunities is one which men have 
entertained from the earliest understanding of what culture means. 
To those who have had the consuming, the inextinguishable ambi- 
tion, its gratification has somehow always come. It has not in- 
evitably come to him who merely regarded a college course as an 
agreeable experience and an obvious part of the genteel preparation 
of a well-mannered young man ; but it has been well-nigh the assured 
endowment of whoever wanted it so earnestly, so persistently, that 
he was willing to make sacrifices for it. 

I am not sure that our young people are living up to that full esti- 
mate of an education's Avorth. I doubt if there is as much of plain 
living and high thinking in academic shades as there was once, or 
might well be now. Among the men I have known who " worked 
their way through college," the ultimate evaluations of their careers 
have seemed to warrant impression that education which comes high 
to its possessor is worth several times as much as education that 
merely comes high to struggling and sacrificing parents. 

It might be an incentive, too, to underpaid professors and instruc- 
tors to go on untiringly if they were brought into contact with more 
of evidence that their students were making sacrifices corresponding 
to their own. I recall a clever young man who held a chair in a 
small college and was regarded as promising a brilliant career in 
scholarship. He had developed a specialized proficiency in a certain 
science, which made him much sought after by concerns engaged in 
a particular line of war industry. At length he resigned and accepted 
a position with one of them. To some expostulations of an academic 
associate, he replied : 

To be honest, I had tired a bit of living on less than many of my pupils sijend. 
1 have lectured to a good many young men whose allowances were twice my 
salary, and who in a few years after graduation were using what I had taught 
them to earn five times my income. Why shouldn't I try the experiment of 
living in comfort and wori-ying over my income-tax statement? 



9 

I can not prescribe the cure, but much of the unrest of the world 
to-day is chargeable to our living too rapidly, and too extravagantly, 
and colleges have seen the reflex of it in conditions described by 
sentiments above quoted. It would be fine to drive to restored sim- 
plicity, and turn the savings to widened facilities, and the healthful 
practice to the making of better men and women. 

Along with all this there is the obligation to maintain and encour- 
age the smaller colleges, among which none is entitled to claim so 
romantic and appealing a history as the institution whose guests we 
are to-day. It is the small college that democratizes the higher 
education; that brings it within the vision and means of the average 
young man and woman. Here, too, the student finds that intimate 
association with his instructors which is impossible in the greatest 
universities, and w^hich sb largely countervails the advantage of the 
wealthier institutions in endowments and facilities. 

The essence of a great school is not in marble and mortar and 
architecture; nor yet in multitude of matriculants. The substance 
of scholarship is not in accumulated tomes and musty manuscripts. 
We hear much of the traditions of famous universities, but if we 
look into them we commonly find that they concern men, men who 
have stamped their personalities, who have given of their generous 
natures, who have colored the intellectual atmosphere about them. 
And men who are big and strong enough to do that are as likely to 
be found in the modest as in the impressive environment. 

If you will analyze the traditions of William and Mary you will 
agree with me that George Wythe, whom Jefferson lovingly and 
reverently called " the Aristides of America," could never have 
exerted so determining an influence over his pupils had their asso- 
ciations been the casual ones of student and teacher in a great modern 
university. And there was Col. Ewell, soldier and scholar, who held 
the presidency of his beloved William and Mary during the years, 
following the Civil War, when for want of funds the university sus- 
pended. There were neither students nor money ; the buildings had 
been left ruins in the wake of war ; but there was the unbroken faith, 
the stout heart of that grand old man whom the late Senator Hoar 
thus described in a speech at Harvard in 1886 : 

The stout-hearted old president still rings the morning bell and keeps the 
charter alive; and I want to salute him to-day from Harvard, and I should 
value it more than any public honor or private good foitune that eould come 
to me if I might live to see that old historic college of Virginia endowed anew 
with liberal aid of the sons of Harvard. 

Col. Ewell's affection for his alma mater was the sentiment that 
thousands of men entertain for the small colleges that afforded 
them the education they could never have secured at great institu- 
tions. Our trouble is not that there are too many small colleges, but 



10 

that there are not enough of them. In this teeming, this riotously 
rich and growing America, they will not stay small. The small 
college of yesterday is the great school of to-day ; the pioneer prairie 
universities of a few decades ago now count their faculties in hun- 
dreds, their students far into the thousands, and are the wonders of 
the academic world. Let us not fear for the place of the small 
college in American life ; let us rather give it all encouragement in its 
beginnings and in those periods of struggle and depression such as 
TVilliam and Mary has so many times known and so splendidly 
survived. 

There is no more interesting educational story than that of the 
rise of the State universities which have grown up in almost all of 
the States: of city colleges and universities, maintained wholly or 
in part as municipal institutions of higher learning ; finally, of that 
great majority of our colleges and universities, which have been 
built and maintained through the interest and philanthropy of re- 
ligious denominations or of citizens inspired only by the wish to 
encourage learning. 

In no country or age has there been so constant and generous sup- 
port for education. Wise men have seen in this marked American 
characteristic an eloquent testimony to the soundness of our indi- 
vidualistic society, and the security of those institutions of popular 
government on which it rests. At the last, our hopes for the evo- 
lution of a constantly improving system of human organization will 
find their justification in the widening, the deepening, the universali- 
zation of that intelligence, that moral consciousness which furnish 
inspiration for every human advance. Believing this, and convinced 
that the American Nation believes it, I salute as high exemplar and 
ideal the spirit that has fostered, maintained, and is now summon- 
ing to a new place and greatness, this Spartan among American uni- 
versities, the College of William and Mary, in Virginia. 



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